No Bull Bill: Gates' blunt legacy

By TODD BISHOP, P-I REPORTER
| on June 23, 2008

Photo: / Associated Press

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"He's the guy who founded the culture, but the culture now thrives on its own," Tandy Trower said of his departing boss. "I can remember from the very early days at Microsoft how inspiring Bill was ... .""He's the guy who founded the culture, but the culture now thrives on its own," Tandy Trower said of his departing boss. "I can remember from the very early days at Microsoft how inspiring Bill was ... ." Others say there were some downsides to Gates' brusque style of doing business.

The message to top Microsoft Corp. executives wasn't that different from many others -- written by an aggravated Windows user who simply wanted to install a piece of the company's software on his computer.

First, it was a struggle just to unearth the Movie Maker program on the company's Web site, the Microsoft chairman wrote. Even after he found it, Gates complained, the process of downloading was "more like a puzzle that you get to solve" -- with instructions that seemed like "a bunch of incantations."

Finally, he was able to install the software. Or so he thought.

"I go to my add/remove programs place to make sure it is there. It is not there. What is there? The following garbage is there," he wrote, listing a series of confusing file names. "Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable?"

The January 2003 message, buried among the documents turned over in one of the company's antitrust trials, reveals one of the ways the iconic Microsoft leader has wielded his unique brand of influence to make changes inside the company.

Gates this week will conclude his day-to-day duties at the software giant, more than 30 years after he formed it as a small partnership with his friend Paul Allen. Microsoft has been preparing for two years for his shift to his philanthropic foundation, and new leaders are in place.

But in many ways, there will be no replacing Gates.

"I think the operative word is intense," said Paul Maritz, a former Microsoft group vice president. "He is somebody who likes to deeply, intellectually engage with problems -- and when he does, he can be pretty formidable in the value that he can add."

Instilling the Fear of Bill

Especially during Microsoft's formative years, Gates' hard-nosed style was like a hammer shaping the company's culture, and its products. The prospect of a technical review with Gates would instill the Fear of God -- or more precisely, the Fear of Bill -- in Microsoft's product teams.

Gates quickly became legendary for telling people that their idea was the stupidest he'd ever heard -- so much so that Maritz would assure them not to worry, "because they weren't going to hold the record for long."

In an interview last week, Gates feigned disagreement when it was pointed out that he would often spice up the phrase with an expletive. "No, no, no," he said, laughing. "Literally, I do say, 'That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard.' Some people think I add some other word in there, but I don't -- usually."

Turning serious, he added, "I have a mixture of encouraging people, telling them what's right, what's not. Obviously, that's how you run a big enterprise like this, and get the best people to want to keep doing these jobs."

Back in the day, Microsoft's product groups would gather huge amounts of data and prepare at length to go head-to-head with Gates during intense meetings, said Michael Cusumano, a professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management who has written extensively on the company.

"He was always so good at understanding details and catching things very quickly," Cusumano said. "It put everybody on a higher plane of preparedness."

Gates is remarkable for "the way his mind integrates things into a big-picture view in real time," said Craig Mundie, Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer, one of two executives assuming Gates' duties. "Whatever goes in, the next time he speaks, it's as if he had that fact forever."

To be sure, there were downsides to Gates' style. Microsoft's aggressive culture showed in the business tactics that led to the landmark antitrust suits against the company in the U.S. and Europe. And internal e-mails from the 1990s show Microsoft executives commiserating after Gates delivered some harsh words.

Others have more pleasant memories. Tandy Trower, a Microsoft general manager who joined the company in 1981, still keeps an early message in which Gates encouraged him and empathized with his frustrations over a challenging situation.

"He's the guy who founded the culture, but the culture now thrives on its own," Trower said last week. "I can remember from the very early days at Microsoft how inspiring Bill was -- not just because he was a smart guy, but because of the things he would do on a personal level."

With Gates at the helm, Microsoft became the world's largest software company and a central figure in the technology world. It made more than $14 billion in profit last fiscal year.

"Basically, Bill took on IBM and won, and that created an environment of excitement, where the whole company was focused on managing the explosion of the PC business," said Bob Herbold, the retired Microsoft chief operating officer. That environment, Herbold said, was the reason he left his senior executive position at Procter & Gamble Co. to join Microsoft in 1994.

A gradual shift

Gates isn't leaving completely. His departure from daily life at Microsoft will be marked as a watershed event, but he will remain chairman and take part in selected projects on a part-time basis. In some ways, Gates has been making the transition since the early part of the decade, when Steve Ballmer became Microsoft's chief executive.

The executive picked to fill Gates' role as Microsoft's chief software architect, Ray Ozzie, has a more genial style. It's no coincidence that one of his specialties is collaboration software. But he's effective in his own way, said Esther Dyson, a technology investor and longtime industry figure who has known both Gates and Ozzie for years.

"I think people want Ray's approval. They want his praise, his respect and admiration," Dyson said. "I always felt with Bill, if he bothered to argue with you, it was a sign of respect. If he didn't bother to engage, that's when you needed to really worry."

Mundie will be responsible for the other half of Gates' duties -- overseeing Microsoft's long-term technology vision.

"I think we've done all that can be done by a company to make this a graceful transition over a long period of years," Mundie said. "I expect in a few weeks, we'll have a little bit of an emotional blip as people really come to grips with the fact that you can't run over to his office and expect the same question to get answered. Or he won't be writing a mail at midnight on Sunday. But I think the company will get past that fairly quickly."

The effects of Gates' shift will also be lessened by the company's sheer size. With about 90,000 employees, Microsoft has grown beyond the point where a single person could have the kind of influence that Gates did in the company's early years.

Even so, his shift away from Microsoft could influence internal and external perceptions of the company, said Amy Wohl, an industry analyst who has followed the company for much of its history. Even as he has shared leadership duties with Ballmer and others, Gates has been the primary face of Microsoft.

"It will take a while for people to get over that," Wohl said. "Even though he still will have a strong amount of influence in the company ... you'll see him playing less of a role over time. The company has to learn how to do without him at some point."

A blunt approach

In his heyday at Microsoft, Gates had a huge internal influence on all aspects of the company. Among other things, his blunt approach would often force people to get quickly to the point.

"This is a lot of slides that I doubt you will get thru with bill," cautioned Microsoft executive Yusuf Mehdi, in an October 1996 e-mail exchange, planning for an Internet Explorer meeting. "So I would have an exec summary of no more than 5 slides with key goals/takeaways upfront. If he agrees then you can talk about the plan to achieve it."

In a May 1997 e-mail exchange, also turned over during one of the company's trials, then-Microsoft executive Ben Slivka wrote privately to Maritz that Gates had been "amazingly, unnecessarily rude" -- accusing Slivka of "trying to destroy Windows," among other things.

In his response at the time, Maritz followed the Microsoft tradition of calling Gates by his e-mail alias: "One of Billg's faults (and it is a real fault) is that he does not [give] positive feedback when it is needed," he wrote. "You should not have to wonder what he thinks of you. You have gotten things moving when others have been mesmerized."

Gates, 52, lightheartedly disputes the assertion that he has mellowed with age. "Bullshit," he responded, laughing, when that theory was floated during the interview in his office last week.

But people who have known him for years say he has mellowed, to a degree. Dyson said he seemed particularly happy when she saw him at a recent conference. She said she doesn't think he'll be tempted to return to a larger Microsoft role, given the work that awaits him at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Gates agreed with that.

"If I didn't have that, it would be tough for me, because I'm not a sit-on-the-beach type," he said. "I'll let myself play a tiny bit more bridge in the next few months than I normally do. But I'm going to be working the same type of energetic, full-time schedule that I'm used to, and the foundation will come into that."

Shown his 2003 e-mail detailing his problems downloading Movie Maker, Gates smiled last week and said the message was not unique. "There's not a day that I don't send a piece of e-mail ... like that piece of e-mail," he said. "That's my job."